Typical hard disk drives store and retrieve information from a storage medium. This storage and retrieval includes encoding data written to the storage medium, and decoding information retrieved from the storage medium. The decoding is essentially the reverse of the encoding. The strength of the encoding is often a function of how many parity bits are added to the encoded user data. While stronger encoding is generally desired as it provides an ability to correct more errors, such stronger encoding, however, uses area on the storage medium that would otherwise be used to store user data. Hence, there is a balance between stronger decoding and the overhead required to incorporate the stronger encoding. This balance in some cases results in excess overhead, and in other cases uncorrectable errors.
Hence, for at least the aforementioned reasons, there exists a need in the art for advanced systems and methods for data processing.